


together or not at all

by MercuryM



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s04e11 The Other Side, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Missing Scene, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-15
Updated: 2017-05-15
Packaged: 2018-11-01 03:48:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10913703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryM/pseuds/MercuryM
Summary: She had let Bellamy open the bunker. She had doomed her people to a possible death. She had risked the fate of the human race. She had lied and gone behind the backs of people she had claimed to care about only for it to be just another hollow promise, another hollow explanation,  another deceit born out of desperation and having the world rest on her shoulders.She took a shot but couldn’t pull the trigger, not on him. And there laid the problem.





	together or not at all

**Author's Note:**

> I finally caught up with The 100 today (blasted exams) and I was very unsatisfied how the Bellamy/Clarke's gun scene was brought to an end. It felt very unresolved to me, and I needed to vent about my frustration over it. Just when it felt like Clarke and Bellamy would have a talk about Clarke's choices and how she can't keep doing this, the scene got cut off and I literally yelled at my screen when the episode finished and somehow, with the power of magic and rainbows, Bellamy and Clarke seemed back to being partners with barely a hitch. Clarke deserved to be called out about her actions, we deserved to see her reaction after trying to shoot Bellamy and the emotional backlash of her inability to pull the trigger on him, we deserved to see Bellamy's reaction to it all, Bellamy's forgiveness (if we assume he forgave her) shouldn't have been absolute, he shouldn't have let her off the hook as easily as the show made us believe he did.
> 
> I just- I have a lot of feelings on the matter. For a show that claims it's all about show don't tell, they ain't really showing us the important parts that make characters feel like they posses a soul, a heart. I don't know, it's maybe just me that thinks this, maybe it will be touched upon in this week's episode (hah, as if), but I wanted to write my own take on it and one of the ways I would've liked to see it go.

He looked at her one last time, at the gun hanging from her hand, at her face - and God, Clarke felt that look spreading like poison through her lungs, making every breath a struggle - and then kept on climbing the stairs, heavy steps fading into nothing as he neared the hatch.

Her fingers were numb from clutching the gun, her wrist hurting from the pressure of having it pointed at him and not wanting to shoot him at the same time. Her eyes stung from her tears and the air rattled inside her ribcage. Then, like a puppet having had its strings cut, she stumbled back few steps, feeling dizzy, weak, and leaned on the wall behind her, sliding down on the floor, the gun slipping from her hand.

The tears keep on sliding down her cheeks and she doesn’t try to fight them. She figured that was how the monuments of the Old World felt when the nuclear bombs hit them - empty, cold, crumbling to dust, big hunks of stone and metal reduced to shadows of themselves, having lost all that made them stand proud and represent an idea.

Her left hand, the one that had pulled the trigger on him, was shaking. Clarke brought it to her face and laughed, let out a sob, was this what she had become?

One sob turned into a second one, into a third one, until she was heaving with the force of her crying, arms around her legs and pulled tight against her body, rocking back and forth in a desperate attempt to keep the panic away.

She had let Bellamy open the bunker. She had doomed her people to a possible death. She had risked the fate of the human race. She had lied and gone behind the backs of people she had claimed to care about only for it to be just another hollow promise, another hollow explanation,  another deceit born out of desperation and having the world rest on her shoulders.

She took a shot but couldn’t pull the trigger, not on him. And there laid the problem.

Her ears still rang with the sound of Bellamy’s voice, with the noise from the bullet. When did she become this girl, this woman? When did she lose herself in the desperate attempt to always have all the answers, to always be right?

She was cold, so damn cold, her mind a chaos that had no beginning nor end, drifting in and out as if she could find a resolution to this mess.

At some point the shaking stopped, the tears did too, and she felt tired down to the marrow in her bones, her muscles aching from the position she had forced them into. Pain was an old friend of hers, but this all-encompassing sorrow was crushing her in a new way, a way she didn’t know how to deal with, a way she wasn’t sure she had the _right_ to overcome.

Bellamy had been her one constant ever since landing on Earth. They had come together when it had mattered the most and had stayed together through good and bad ever since. They had led together, fought together, bled together, they were each other’s pillars. She trusted him to pull her back when things got rough and she was way over her head, and he trusted her- did he still after all she did tonight?

Was this just another way she had left him like she did after Mount Weather? The idea for them to take the bunker for themselves had been hers, born out of fear, of desperation, of fatigue of always having to win battle after battle to ensure her people’s survival. Did that make her the new monster hiding in plain sight?

But none of that mattered now. The bunker was open - the rest was out of her hands, at least for the moment.

Clarke had no idea how long she stood there, leaning against the wall and lamenting her own existence, and it took a while to register the sound of footsteps heading down the ladder.

Octavia emerged first, followed by Bellamy, with Indra at the back. Aside from Octavia’s curious glance, none of them paid her any attention. Bellamy went past her like she wasn’t even there, his gaze locked on the back of Octavia’s head, holding her hand like he was afraid she would disappear or keel over the moment he dared to look away.

 _Just another nail in the coffin_ , Clarke thought, bitterness clogging her throat. _This one well deserved_.

She watched them go despite the pain that caused her, she watched as they neared the corner and Bellamy came to a stop, making Octavia turn around. She watched as he said few words to her - Clarke was too far to make much of their conversation - and Bellamy released his hold on his sister, letting her and Indra go down the hallways as he made his way back to her.

And all Clarke could do was watch. In her mind, she had lost all rights to everything else.

Bellamy stared at her for a moment, his indecision and hurt written all over his face, and then squatted down in front of her, sighing deeply.

“You know,” he started, sounding as tired and drained as she felt, “when I taught you how to shoot I never figured you’d ever point a gun at me.”

“I’m sorry.” She said, barely letting him finish, fresh tears clinging to her eyelashes. She refused to let them drop, refused to make her anguish matter more than his.

Bellamy looked to the side, his jaw clenching, and nodded once before catching her eyes with his again. “I know,” and it sounded as flat as her excuse did, but it mattered just as much.

Because she _was_ sorry and he _did_ know but none of that could change what had happened.

Bellamy swallowed and Clarke braced for the hard part. “You left O out there.” His voice broke at his sister’s nickname and Clarke’s lower lip trembled, hating how shattered he sounded, hated that she was the reason for his pain. “And Kane. You left Monty and Jasper, Harper and Riley. You left Indra and all the Grounders to _die_ , Clarke. When did we start playing God?”

Clarke wanted to protest - Monty and the rest made their choices, hell, _Raven_ made her choice and they let them - but that was not what he meant, so she took another breath and attempted to put some order to her thoughts.

“I had to save as many as I could. The Grounders weren’t going to let us have the bunker. How could I have let that happen after all we’ve done to ensure our survival?”

“And that makes us better than them how?” Bellamy ran a hand through his hair, pulling at the strands sharply and exhaling harshly through his nose. “O won the Conclave, Clarke. You should have trusted her. And even if she hadn’t, do you think you can live in this bunker being reminded every single day of the choices you made along the way? I know I said that the people we are and the people we have to be to survive are very different people, but you forget that you’re not alone in this. You have you mother, you have Kane, fucking hell, Clarke, _you have_ _me_. Can you honestly tell me that you’re alright with letting all those people outside the bunker face the radiation?”

The tears had dried upon her skin and Clarke reached up to brush the itchiness away, feeling Bellamy’s heavy gaze follow her every move. “I thought I was. I thought I was doing the right thing, making sure the human race kept living on. Now,” she shrugged and let her knees unfold, “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

They stayed like that for a long moment - Bellamy looking at her, Clarke looking back. She had no idea what he was searching for, what he was expecting from her, but she had nothing left to give.

“The Grounders are human too. Just because we fell out of the sky and understand technology doesn’t make us more deserving to live.”

She moved a bit to the side and bumped the gun, freezing the moment she was reminded of its presence. “Yeah,” her words came out strangled and she cleared her throat to echo it again, “yeah.”

Bellamy noticed her apprehension, _of course_ he did, and reached a hand to grab the gun, folding his fingers around the stock.

Clarke couldn’t fathom how she had found the strength to point a gun at this face. For all of her pragmatical choices and carefully thought-out plans, she could never win when faced with his morality.

It was one of the reason he meant to much to her. One of the reasons why they were such good partners to begin with.

“What now?”

Bellamy turned the gun in his hand and offered it to her handle first. “We move forward.”

Her fingers started shaking again. From doubt or hope, she didn’t know.

“How?”

“By doing things the way we should have done them the first time around.” His hand was steady as he waited on her to reach forward and get back her gun. “Together or not at all.”

Clarke managed a watery smile and grasped his hand when he went to pull away, squeezing his fingers and pouring all the feelings she couldn’t possibly articulate into her grasp. Bellamy squeezed back, just as tightly if not more, and pulled her to her feet, steadying her when her legs threatened to give.

It was not like this solved anything, the world was waiting for them just around the corner and Clarke had a lot to make up for. And things between her and Bellamy weren’t magically fixed with a wand and few nonsensical words.

But she had hope.

And if hope failed her, she knew Bellamy would be there to weather the storm with her.

Together or not at all.


End file.
